A Non-Resolution to Elect Fatima Al Qadiri to Non-Office

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Fatima Al Qadiri about her visual and musical output. Over the course of a conversation at MOMA PS1 and several e-mail exchanges, one phrase circulated without being bracketed or struck down: “non-resolution.” This condition applies to almost everything the thirty-two-year-old artist has been involved in. For instance, although Al Qadiri has released several albums, including the new “Asiatisch,” she doesn’t perform her music live. She will do d.j. sets, though, and is touring Europe this summer in support of “Asiatisch.” Along with the musicians J-Cush and Nguzunguzu, she is part of the Future Brown collective. But a live show at MOMA PS1, last November, gently unbuckled the idea of performance. Offstage, behind an unlit desk, the four played original tracks that moved through hip-hop and variants of grime and R. & B. Two screens displayed graphics created by Thunder Horse Video, which took the Future Brown logo (rendered in the Facebook typeface) and submitted it to the hurtling shutters-and-gears aesthetic used in ESPN bumpers.

This was a Future Brown show where you didn’t necessarily get to see Future Brown. Closest to the audience, under bright lights, two male-female pairs of semi-professional basketball players worked small stages fitted with full-height baskets. The athletes performed drills choreographed by Prentice Whitlow that framed dribbling and crossovers as dance. Providing a dose of non-resolution, the players never took a shot. An hour of half-basketball and sort-of dancing was, all of it, disorienting and charming. (The players sometimes slipped in their own sweat, lifted each other up, and resumed the routines, neatly clearing away any high-art fumes.)

Al Qadiri is also part of a nine-member art “delegation” named GCC. Their exhibit “GCC: Achievements in Retrospective” is on display at MOMA PS1 through September 7th. GCC is a “reference to the English abbreviation of the Gulf Cooperation Council, an economic and political consortium of Arabian Gulf nations,” according to the collective’s press release. All nine artists in GCC were raised in, or have familial ties to, the Gulf region. The exhibit is refined non-resolution, a quiet coup of suggestion.

In two rooms, GCC set up replicas of the aesthetic debris of masked diplomacy and the celebratory gift-giving obsession that is both native to the Gulf region and generally applicable to any encrypted nation-state hustle. (Has anyone ever encountered one of these governmental groups and not thought, What do they do?) In the first small, brightly lit room, a video plays on loop. A professional voiceover delivers a vague but enthusiastic pitch for GCC, suggesting both a real-estate agent and the owner of a couch warehouse. In the second room, a slice of an office environment is jammed into a corner, behind frosted glass. The cramped space is filled with outdated PCs and a framed portrait of a dignitary (a member of the GCC crew, in costume). The far wall acts as the screen for a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree video of a ribbon-cutting ceremony, while the flanking walls are hung with photos of delegation members shaking hands in the Swiss countryside.

The most potent bit of the exhibition is a stretch of trophies laid out on a low wall. Though the trophies represent a Gulf tradition of exchanging awards, these hideous crystal flanges will resonate for anyone who has moved through corporate America and seen awards and plaques piled on an executive’s bookshelf. The trophies represent a feedback loop that unites corporate and diplomatic language: the sound of applause in a hermetically sealed chamber, the suggestion of cheering from a population that would rather throw rocks than clap. Viewers who know nothing of the Gulf nations will recognize the symbolic euphemisms of nationhood and the worryingly calm scenes of heads of state chilling with other unworried leaders.

“Asiatisch” is also committed to not resolving. The title is the German word for “Asian,” which further distances an English speaker from a project that is working through the sounds of a national identity several times removed. Al Qadiri refers to the music on “Asiatisch” as an artifact derived from the “imagined China” we hear in video games, Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp,” and a clutch of U.K. grime tracks called “sinogrime.” (The phrase was coined after the fact by Steve Goodman, the owner of the Hyperdub label, for a mix he made in 2005, which collected grime tracks produced in a faux-Asian style. Nobody has ever identified themselves, or their tracks, as sinogrime.)

The sound of “Asiatisch” is consistent with Al Qadiri’s other releases, a style indebted to the 8-bit synthesis of video-game soundtracks. The music combines buzzing bass lines, thin melodies, and pale clouds of digitized voices. As she has described it, the tonality is both childlike and villainous. The opening track is called “Shanzai,” a word for the Chinese practice of bootlegging name-brand clothing and electronics. A familiar melody ties together clouds of cheap harmony—Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” rendered in nonsense syllables, found first on YouTube by friends in another art collective. Here, the singer Helen Feng reproduces the copy of a copy, giving “Asiatisch” an extra layer of alienation. After an hour, Al Qadiri leaves you feeling like you’ve played a video game that you’ve never heard of, or walked into an uncomfortably ham-fisted theme bar. Unheimlich.

What was your path from Kuwait to the States?

I was born in Dakar, because my father was working there as a diplomat. We moved back to Kuwait two years later, so I have no memories of Dakar. From the age of two to seventeen, I was in Kuwait. And from seventeen to twenty-two, I was doing undergraduate studies in the States at several different colleges. After that, I was just bouncing around from city to city, but then I came back to New York, in 2007. I’ve been here ever since.

You speak several languages. Is one of them Chinese?

No, I don’t speak Chinese. I can read two scripts of Japanese and I have maybe a two-hundred-word vocabulary in Japanese, but Chinese, no. I mean, I know a little about Chinese as a language because randomly I have a degree in linguistics.

Why do you say “randomly”?

I didn’t choose to have a degree in linguistics. I was in my third year in college at the University of Miami, on a scholarship from the ministry of education in Kuwait. They didn’t have any scholarships to New York because I think they assumed the students wouldn’t go to school, they’d just party. But, finally, in my junior year, the ministry had one scholarship at N.Y.U. for undergrad for linguistics, and I took it. It could’ve been anything. It could’ve been biomedical engineering. I was just lucky that it was linguistics, and I know things about languages because of that. But it is really random.

I am fluent only in English, really. I can read Arabic, but writing is difficult. Written Arabic is classical Arabic. Imagine if The New Yorker or Rolling Stone was written in Old English, in Chaucer’s English, while you’re still speaking what you’re speaking today. That’s what Arabic is like. The spoken languages are the dialects, but imagine that you can’t write them down.

What do you call the language that you speak out loud?

It’s Kuwaiti Modern Arabic. Kuwait has two dialects: Bedouin Arabic and Kuwaiti Modern Arabic. I don’t understand Bedouin Arabic. From country to country, dialects are extremely different. I don’t understand Moroccan Arabic at all. I speak to Moroccans in broken French, and they speak to me in their broken English. That’s how we communicate. They might as well be speaking Malaysian. I have no idea what they’re saying.

Tell me more about the idea of “shanzai,” of Chinese bootleg gear.

The word “shanzai” refers to a stronghold in the mountains run by bandits.

That sounds sort of anti-bootlegger.

I think that it makes sense, because it not only has to do with banditry but with guarding the production of goods. “Shanzai,” the track, started the record, and that’s why it’s the beginning of the record. This record was a very happy accident which started here at PS1. The artists Shanzhai Biennial—who did the cover of the record—were making a video using “Nothing Compares 2 U.” They had found a Mandarin version on YouTube with the lyrics, which proved that the words were phonetic imitations, just nonsense. And they got Helen Feng, who’s a friend of a friend of theirs, to sing those nonsense lyrics. Then they sent me her a cappella with the instructions to write a cheap Chinese instrumental underneath it. And I said O.K., but I’m very bad at following instructions, especially with music. I’m just terrible. I sent them back the track, the one you have, and they said, “This is too sophisticated. We asked you for a cheap Chinese instrumental and instead you gave us this.”

It’s not that sophisticated.

But it was not a cheap Chinese instrumental. They said, “We can’t use this.” I asked if I could use it for something, and they said yes, and that’s what started the record. I wanted to make something about Asian motifs in music, and then quickly plotted and wrote the rest of the album. It encapsulates the idea of removal from the source, just constant layers of signal degradation.

There’s also a presence, on several tracks, of classical Chinese poetry, which is sampled on “Wudang,” “Loading Beijing,” and “Jade Stairs.”

Does that content work against the other content in a way?

Yeah. I think your idea of non-resolution regarding my work is true. As a child, I was really obsessed with “Arabian Nights,” which embodies this idea of not finishing stories every night in order to stay alive. That was the position of Scheherazade with the Sultan: she’d tell a story and not finish it and then tell another story the next day, just to keep him on the edge of his seat. So I’ve been into this. Musically, leaving something open-ended or not with a form of closure is satisfying to me. I’m also dyslexic, so I feel that the way that I write, formally, is slightly disjointed.

How do you mean?

The structure doesn’t follow a pop-song formula. The structure is always off. I improvise all my music. That’s how it starts. Strains of it will be interesting, but if you formalize that, that’s when it becomes a novel, you know. That’s the analogy for me.

When you think of the record being out, how do you imagine its life, as it moves around?

It’s this simulated road trip through an imagined China, a virtual China. It inhabits three layers: Ancient China, in the form of classical poetry; in the middle, you have China today as represented by the West; and the imagined China. I mean, it’s shit like that—not just Asian motifs in Western music, not just comic books, not just movies. It’s sociopolitical as well as a cartoon. It’s been building up since the Opium Wars, the first major interaction between China and the West, but it’s also about China today, the real China. Which I’ve never been to. That’s why I feel like I want to discuss this imagined China. It’s like a junkyard: you can’t figure out any fabric or any piece of scrap metal. It’s an unwieldy subject. The album is about the dislocation of stereotypes over centuries.

How did you figure out how to render that idea musically?

There’s an “Asian” kit in [the music programming software] Logic, and I used it. I didn’t even have to create anything—it’s all there in virtual instrument form. So there are the virtual instruments that come with the software to mimic the virtual China, which is so perfect. Even the instrumentation is virtually created by Western software engineers. The only samples on the record are the classical Chinese poetry and the vocal a cappella for “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Everything else was written in Logic, using virtual Chinese instruments. The production reinforces the record on an instrumental level.